


Easy

by TeddyRadiator



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-17
Updated: 2020-05-17
Packaged: 2021-03-03 04:00:24
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,041
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24238444
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TeddyRadiator/pseuds/TeddyRadiator
Summary: To Minerva, magic is easy, and therefore it shapes the way she views her world. To Severus Snape, nothing is easy, and therefore this shapes the way Minerva views him.
Relationships: Minerva McGonagall/Severus Snape
Comments: 3
Kudos: 62





	Easy

Minerva McGonagall had never been the most patient of witches. Perhaps it was because magic had been so easy for her—it was not something she thought about or gave any serious concentration. Magic had flown from her fingertips from an early age, more purposeful than capricious, more pragmatic than prideful. She no more thought of magic as a skill than tying shoes would be considered a performance. You just did it. It was in her bones and her blood and her brains. Mad-eye Moody once quipped that Minerva McGonagall ‘pissed more magic than most witches ever conjured.’

It made her both a good and bad teacher. She was pedantic enough to understand the physics of magic. She could tell a student how the turn of a wrist, how the movement of a wand through a certain series of molecular particles in the air would produce certain results. But it also made her impatient; she simply could not understand how a student, after being told exactly how and when and with this amount of pressure and that combination of intent and physicality and rhythm, could not get the proper results.

And no student irritated her more than one like Severus Snape. Oh, he was intelligent enough—gifted, even. But stubborn. He had been the type of student that always stood defiant in his shortcomings. Other pupils she could bully-rag and berate and harangue. Not Mr. Snape. The more she pushed, the more he would back up into his sullen, defiant, brittle shell. Only his dark, reproachful eyes would remain behind to act as witness, like the Cheshire cat’s smile. Severus Snape was too flinty, too complicated for Minerva to analyse, so she didn’t. She left him to his own devices and moved on to the more agreeable individuals in her charge.

Looking back, Minerva admitted to a tendency to favour Gryffindors; she’d had Albus’ excellent example to follow, after all. Like her own magic, James Potter and Sirius Black were easy to fathom, easy to manipulate. Messrs. Potter and Black were predictable; she didn’t have to worry about them. Young Mr. Snape was dangerous and excitable, his awkwardness made her feel uncomfortable on his behalf. He always seemed to be on the point of bursting out of his own skin. When Mr. Snape had accused Potter and Black of trying to lure him into the lair of a werewolf, she had looked at the three young men and sided with her own. It had been an easy choice, though why she found herself unable to meet Mr. Snape’s eyes afterward was, as they say, beside the point.

Strangely enough, he had changed abruptly when James Potter took up with the pretty Muggle-born witch, Lily Evans. The animosity the two boys shared over the girl reminded Minerva of two dogs snarling over a bone, so she dismissed it: such inappropriate passion got on her good steady Scottish nerves.

She never understood that inappropriate passion and complexity could be an addictive thing, until Severus Snape returned to Hogwarts as its youngest-ever teacher.

She’d heard the stories, of course. The young Death Eater, his sins cloaked by Albus enough to allow him to find gainful employment molding the young minds of Wizarding Britain. “You cannot be serious, Albus!” she’d protested, upon hearing the news. “You do understand that every parent in the country will bay for your blood—”

“Oh, they’ve been doing that for years, Minerva,” he answered placidly. With his usual patronising combination of affection and dismissal, he’d added, “You will act as his mentor. You’re the perfect role model.”

“Bollocks,” she’d replied. “You just want him to get out of your hair and into mine.”

His expression could not have been more guileless. “What he does in your hair is no business of mine, my dear. Think of it as a challenge.” He’d taken off those glasses of his and peered into her eyes with deadly charm. “It is the stone in the water that gives the brook its music.”

“And you can call it any pleasant thing you like when you smell it, but it’s still bullshit,” she’d retorted.

As she could have predicted, she and Severus almost came to blows on their first mentor/novice meeting. “Being stubborn doesn’t make you correct!” she’d snapped, after he’d refused to take her perfectly sound advice.

“And just because it’s your idea also doesn’t make it correct either!” he’d spat back, his eyes flashing with resentment. By that time, his voice had deepened into a man’s growl, tinged with Northern inflection and Pureblood imitation.

“Don’t come the cowboy with _me_ , Sunny Jim,” she’d threatened darkly. “We both know why you’re here, and I’d tread pretty lightly if I were you.”

He’d sneered at her with a level of reproach that unnerved her. “You think you’re so high and mighty, because you’re Professor ‘I-Can-Do-Anything-Better-Than-You’ McGonagall and I’m just an ex- Death Eater charity case.” The hurt had transformed into contempt. “You don’t know the half of it, witch.”

He’d stalked out, and she’d not answered, because he was correct. She was better than him, and no, she didn’t know and didn’t care to. She only knew she _could_ make him better if he would only swallow his useless, two-sickle pride and listen to her. Anyone could see that.

And so began a relationship that she eventually grew to enjoy, though the beginning was tinged with pleasure and loathing in equal measures. In many ways, they were alike: they were both rail-thin with black hair and black eyes; they shared the same fierce love of learning, competition and firewhisky. In all the things that didn’t matter, they were perfectly compatible.

But in the most basic ways of humans, they were chalk and cheese. Severus questioned everything; he sought out the most complicated way of doing something, then set himself a goal of making it even more difficult. While Minerva regarded magic as a thing of air, letting it flick from her fingertips like drops of water, Severus got his hands dirty, digging for more. He always found it, but Minerva could not be persuaded to understand what all the fuss was about.

“Magic is something we’re born with, Severus. We do it because it’s in our blood,” she said diffidently, as they graded papers.

“That’s the laziest thing I’ve ever heard,” he grumbled, striking through an entire page with red ink. “Magic is something to be harnessed. I control _it_ , whereas you allow it to control _you_. It should be shaped and molded to suit the wizard.”

She had regarded him thoughtfully. “Professor, that is the kind of thinking that created You-Know-Who.”

She would never forget the resignation in his face. “That is the kind of thinking that created Merlin as well, Minerva,” he’d replied, his voice low and throbbing with emotion. “The same basic magic components that created Unforgivables are present in most healing spells. If you weren’t so fucking shallow, you’d remember that _intent_ is the key.”

Before she could take him to task, he rose from his chair, and with a hissed word and a downward slash of his wand, he cut open the sleeve of her robe, and to her horror, sliced open her arm in the process. It was a deep cut, and bled profusely. Minerva jerked away, stricken by the sight of so much blood spilling unnecessarily.

“What in Merlin’s name are you—”

He grabbed her arm, and his black merciless eyes blazed into hers as he began to chant. His voice was low and intense, and the magic was unlike anything she’d ever cast, ever seen. She could feel it leeching into her veins, drawing the blood back in, purifying it, sealing the wound, stitching from within. She was filled with a sense of him, as if some of his essence was flowing back into her blood along with his magic.

She looked down at her arm. It was totally blemishless; there was no trace of any cut at all. He brushed his fingers over her skin. “You see?” he murmured, his eyes still following his hand as he stroked her arm, pride and sensuality in his touch. “Deep magic. To heal, you have to understand how to harm first.” He released her arm, mending the torn fabric with a series of spells that seemed rather clumsy after his previous demonstration. Without another word, he gathered up his essays, and left her alone with her thoughts. He had made his point: destruction had its own easy elegance. Renewal, rebirth, the cold light of day—well, that was another matter.

Minerva sat in her sterile little chambers that night and thought of Severus Snape. She had tossed fruitlessly in bed, unable to sleep. By morning, she had convinced herself she disliked the little scrote, and Albus could mentor him if he thought the boy required it She didn’t need the headache and the responsibility of trying to decipher this frustrating, inconvenient wizard.

By then, she was many years widowed, and firmly entrenched in Hogwarts life. Taking a lover was more trouble than it was worth. She told herself that, even as she was panting her way through another orgasm beneath Severus Snape.

They became lovers for the same pragmatic reasons Minerva did everything else. Severus described it in a nutshell: “With you and I it was a ‘fuck or kill’ situation. I’m still not sure if we made the right choice.” To Minerva, it had been the acceptance that she couldn’t be bothered with the task of deciphering him. She could just take the easy route and enjoy his crabbed, fumbling brutality, which on occasion left her feeling bruised and smug in the right places for days on end.

Even then, he was incapable of seeing it for what it was. Sex was another research project with him, to be staged and planned, each movement to be thoroughly considered and tested, each response intently noted and recorded. During the early days of their association, Minerva could not locate a spontaneous bone in his body. She would not have been surprised to discover he had journals written on the subject of how to bring her to orgasm. He certainly pursued it enough.

“You make everything such a production,” she drawled, wallowing in a bed still damp with their sweat and juices, while he sat, propped up against the headboard, smoking a Muggle cigarette. “Why can’t it be a simple act of two people letting off a little steam?”

He blew a plume of blue smoke over their heads and fixed her with those dark, accusing eyes. “That’s your problem. It’s not that you mind things being complicated. You just don’t want to delve into them.” He sneered, “Nothing is simple, Minerva. Nothing is easy.”

“Tosh! It’s complicated because you decide to make it so. You’ve always been like that, ever since you were a little boy.”

He cut his eyes and gave her a look that really shouldn’t have excited her as much as it did. “But I’m not a little boy anymore, am I?” he asked softly.

He vanished the cigarette and kissed her roughly, the way she liked it. His tongue still burned from tobacco, and underneath she tasted his complexities. “You fuck me because I’m convenient. But I keep fucking _you_ because I’m difficult,” he said, pushing her thighs apart with a young man’s arrogant simplicity. “It’s only simple because you don’t think about it.” His thrusts hit that one sweet spot, and soon neither of them were thinking about anything, and that was the way she preferred it.

And so they fought and fucked and argued and reconciled. Those were the good years, when the hardest thing to fret over was the loss of house points, and the only thing keeping her up at night besides Severus was how to win the House Cup.

As the days grew darker so did Severus; she saw him grow older every year, weighed down by his guilt and frustrations. “This silliness over Boy Potter has to stop,” she announced during a blazing row during the boy’s second year at Hogwarts. “You are being as childish as the students. Being petty and thin-skinned are not attractive personality traits, Severus.”

“If you wanted an attractive lover, why are you with me?” he’d shot back.

“Stop being so literal! You know you can be perfectly attractive when you’re not being an arse!” She wanted to both shake him and hold him. He infuriated and aroused her in equal measures.

“I am what I am,” he declared, doubt and painful hope beginning to war in his eyes. “You—you find me attractive?” he asked hesitantly, and Minerva did hold him then, and wished he was either a complete bastard or a complete gentleman. She just didn’t have the time and energy to try and fathom him. He’d been the one who raised the act of examining his feelings to an art form; she had never seen the point.

* * *

Then came that last, awful year, when nothing was easy or clever or effortless anymore, and she failed him as both an enemy and a friend. Every day brought another thing to be afraid of, another child to protect, another battle to lose. By then, her life was extremely simple. All she had to do was stay alive.

Nights were the worst. In the dark, fear settled over the school like a Dementor, and without the promise of tomorrow’s sun, the night seemed endless and miserable. On those horrible nights, Minerva would almost give into the thought that she would never experience happiness again. Those were the night when she missed him in her bed the most, missed hearing the soft pad of his feet on the floor. She missed the feel of the sheet sliding from her body as she pretended to be asleep, just to anticipate the bed gently sag beneath his slight weight, his tenderness as he tried to pleasure her awake. She missed his complications and bloody-minded intensity. She missed his sardonic humour and black moods and his cigarette ash and the chip that rode on his shoulder even as he rode her.

She missed his contemplative brutality and the look on his face when passion made him abandon his complicated designs and he simply allowed himself to be a creature of sensation. No one but Severus had ever tried to draw her in to their world, to take her places she had never been. Now she was forever banned from it, from him.

And on the mornings after those nights she’d feel old and used up and helpless. She would see his gaunt, hollow-eyed stare looking through her, and she would turn and leave, cursing herself for still wanting him. And because she had never bothered to learn him, she could never reconcile her feelings that he might just be playing a role, and that perhaps he felt the same things in those dark nights. Time had made him no easier to understand; but it had made her motivations more furiously questionable to herself.

* * *

That last morning, when the world awoke to a free Wizarding world, Minerva walked through the Infirmary, trying to give a word of encouragement here, an instruction there. Eyes followed her, beseeching her to tell them what to do. She had no advice to give. She walked to the end of the room, to a door heavily warded with her most complicated pattern. It opened easily for her, as she knew it would.

She stepped into the room, and crossed to the still figure lying on the bier. A lone candle flickered by his head, and Minerva looked down into the face of her lover, her student, her friend, her enemy, and for a brief time, her challenger. He was a tangled mess of matted black hair, blood and sorrow; death had been no kinder to Severus than life.

Minerva fetched a bowl of water and a soft cloth, and she cleaned him by hand. Magic would have been easier—effortless, in fact, but Severus’ lesson had finally found root: sometimes you had to take the hard way because that was the only way to truly know.

She washed his black hair, cleaned his pale face, and tidied his clothing, until he looked himself again. By the time she finished, Minerva herself was grimy, covered in filth, and weeping so hard she could barely see him through her tears.

“Sometimes I wish I had never laid eyes on you, Severus Snape,” she whispered, and the flickering light played a trick on the shadows of his face, and he seemed to smirk at her and reply, _But sometimes you’re glad you did, aren’t you? You fucked me because I’m convenient, Minerva, not because I’m easy. Never forget it._ Her life, her magic, her desires, would be restored back to the simple, easy harmony she’d always known before him.

Why did that not give her a little peace? She fell to her knees, and somewhere deep down in her soul, past magic, past the molecular elements of _her_ , she felt something, and she dragged it to the surface, kicking and screaming, and she screamed with it.

She had no doubt that Severus felt things deeply, more so, in fact, than she ever would or would ever want to. Feelings were complicated, and troublesome, and suddenly she _knew_ that he had missed her on those dark nights; he had needed her far more than she ever had missed or needed him. He had _lived_ , hard-scrabble and dirty and difficult, right down to the ink-stained tips of his long fingers. He had tasted the sweetness among the bitter dregs, while Minerva in her safe, easy world, had barely skimmed the surface.

When she was able, she rose and obliterated all trace of grief from her face. She straightened her clothing, and smoothed her hair. At the door, she took a deep breath, and stepped through, leaving Severus to his rest. There would be time to mourn later, if necessary. For now, though, there was a world out there waiting for her to take charge of it. He no longer needed her, but they did.

It was as simple as that.


End file.
